Colorado Symphony chief executive Gene Sobczak is leaving the orchestra after just one year on the job.

Replacing him as head of day-to-day operations is Jerome Kern. Kern co-chairs the CSO’s board of trustees along with his wife, Mary Rossick Kern.

Sobczak, who gave up his job as head of the Arvada Center to take the orchestra position, said Thursday that he plans to set up a consultancy working with cultural nonprofits. The CSO will be among his clients.

“I had made the commitment to myself to stay on for a year and to determine then where my work was best-placed,” he said Thursday.

His departure is voluntary, he said, and establishing his own firm “was already in my thinking prior to the CSO appointment.”

In the world of nonprofit cultural organizations, it is rare to have the same person serve as chair and executive director. In most cases, the CEO reports to the board, which serves as a check on the paid staff.

But it is not unheard of. In fact, Daniel Ritchie is chairman and CEO of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Ritchie and Kern are similar in that they are also businessmen with the means to have donated significant funds to their organizations. Like Ritchie, Kern will not take a salary.

Kern on Thursday likened the CSO’s setup to a for-profit company where the job of board chair and CEO often overlap.

Running the CSO will be “no different than any other company,” said Kern, who formerly served concurrently in board and executive positions in the cable-television business with the companies On Command and Playboy Enterprises.

“We are trying to teach our people to see themselves, not as a nonprofit but as a for-profit with tax advantages,” Kern said.

The Kerns assumed their current board positions in October 2011, during a serious CSO financial crisis, and in the wake of the resignation of most board members. Sobczak was hired two months later.

During the trio’s tenure, the CSO went from having a $1.3 million budget deficit to operating with a balanced ledger.

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